Saturday, March 6, 2010

Meet Mali

Mali is the second page for The Story of the Traveling Pages group I am participating in this year (see the badge on my sidebar).  This page is for Gayle, whose theme is "All Creatures Great and Small". 

closeup

I love animals myself and the hardest part of this page was narrowing down the options! While I was choosing an animal I saw a news item about the birth of a baby elephant at the Melbourne Zoo. Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to do! I searched for pictures of elephants and babies and picked portions of several that I liked, then composed a design that is sort of “original.”

I used a couple of techniques that are fairly new to me. For the background – and Mama – I painted the linen with Jacquard fabric paints.

P2150013

Imagine how pleased I was when Sarge recognized a half-finished elephant from upside-down! Then I pulled out every resource I have on Stumpwork. It is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time but this was the first opportunity to actually do so.

P2230007

I decided to use long-and-short stitch for the baby, but my experience with it has been only simple shapes. So, once again, I needed to refer to several resources!  My goodness - I'm learning all kinds of fun stuff!

P2260007

I particularly enjoyed assembling the separate pieces and adding felt padding to raise the surface.

3-D

In this shot, you can see how far the baby's forehead stands out from the surface, and that her ears and trunk are free-standing.  It's so cute that way!

P2270004

For the back, I found some jungle animal fabric.  OK, these are probably African animals, and Mali is an Asian elephant.  Picky, picky!

Mali is a Thai word for jasmine. If you have not seen the cute photos  and videos of her, check out this web page: http://www.zoo.org.au/babyelephant .

I had so much fun making this page - although it took longer than I anticipated - and the baby turned out far better than I expected.  But it was really hard to ship her off to someone else!  She's too cute.  I hope Gayle thinks so, too.

Next I am working on a theme of Trees.  This one is turning out to be fun, too!

11 comments:

Maya Sara Matthew said...

Thank you for sharing the steps that were taken to create this beautiful page.
I love elephants too and you know in most South Indian languages "malli" means jasmine :) what a happy coincidence.

Doreen G said...

Liz this is incredible--for someone who hadn't done this type of work before you should be very proud.

kerrykatiecakes2 said...

Your baby elephant is wonderful! You did so well on each step = thank you for sharing them!
Hugs,
Kerry

CarolynPhi said...

Your adorable baby elephant is outstanding!!! And...YES you can absolutely, definitely claim him as an original work. LOL!!!

If Gayle doesn't want him (VBG)I'll adopt him...what a lucky lady she is!
Carolyn from California

Kay said...

This is wonderful, Liz. You did a beautiful job with these techniques.

tisme said...

I love your elephant, it is fantastic!! You did a wonderful job on it.

Annie said...

What a super page. I'm amazed at how beautiful that is for a first try at new and not very easy techniques.

CJ STITCHING AND BLOOMS said...

WOW, Liz, what a super fantastic Stumpwork Elephant you created. Such truly wonderful stitching. Excellent. Hugs Judy

Myron said...

Awesome job Sis...
Next try an Eagle

Gina E. said...

Gorgeous, Liz! What a lovely tribute to our little Mali! Did you know that a second baby elephant has just been born here in Australia? This time in the zoo in Sydney, NSW. The zookeepers thought the baby had died before being born, but at the time of birth, he emerged quite alive!

Ruth said...

Thanks for the explanation - great work!